VMware VROOM! Bloghttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance
from VMware's performance teamWed, 20 Sep 2017 01:10:59 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.4Performance of Enterprise Web Applications in Docker Containers on VMware vSphere 6.5https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/09/docker-vsphere65-weathervane-perf.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/09/docker-vsphere65-weathervane-perf.html#respondWed, 20 Sep 2017 01:10:59 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3226Docker containers are growing in popularity as a deployment platform for enterprise applications. However, the performance impact of running these applications in Docker containers on virtualized infrastructures is not well understood. A new white paper is available that uses the open source Weathervane performance benchmark to investigate the performance of an enterprise web application running […]

]]>Docker containers are growing in popularity as a deployment platform for enterprise applications. However, the performance impact of running these applications in Docker containers on virtualized infrastructures is not well understood. A new white paper is available that uses the open source Weathervane performance benchmark to investigate the performance of an enterprise web application running in Docker containers in VMware vSphere 6.5 virtual machines (VMs). The results show that an enterprise web application can run in Docker on a VMware vSphere environment with not only no degradation of performance, but even better performance than a Docker installation on bare-metal.

Weathervane is used to evaluate the performance of virtualized and cloud infrastructures by deploying an enterprise web application on the infrastructure and then driving a load on the application. The tests discussed in the paper use three different deployment configurations for the Weathervane application.

VMs without Docker containers: The application runs directly in the guest operating systems in vSphere 6.5 VMs, with no Docker containers.

VMs with Docker containers: The application runs in Docker containers, which run in guest operating systems in vSphere 6.5 VMs.

Bare-metal with Docker containers: The application runs in Docker containers, but the containers run in an operating system that is installed on a bare-metal server.

The figure below shows the peak results achieved when running the Weathervane benchmark in the three configurations. The results using Docker containers include the impact of tuning options that are discussed in detail in the paper.

Some important things to note in these results:

The performance of the application using Docker containers in vSphere 6.5 VMs is almost identical to that of the same application running in VMs without Docker.

The application running in Docker containers in VMs outperforms the same application running in Docker containers on bare metal by about 5%. Most of this advantage can be attributed to the sophisticated algorithms employed by the vSphere 6.5 scheduler.

The results discussed in the paper, along with the results of previous investigations of Docker performance on vSphere, show that vSphere 6.5 is an ideal platform for deploying applications in Docker containers.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/09/docker-vsphere65-weathervane-perf.html/feed0What-If? Resource Management with vSphere DRShttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/resource-management-vsphere-drs.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/resource-management-vsphere-drs.html#commentsMon, 28 Aug 2017 23:51:56 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3207vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) provides a simple and easy way to manage your cluster resources. DRS works well, out of the box for most vSphere installations. For cases where more flexibility is desired in how the cluster is managed, DRS provides many options in the form of cluster rules, settings and advanced options. Often […]

]]>vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) provides a simple and easy way to manage your cluster resources. DRS works well, out of the box for most vSphere installations.

For cases where more flexibility is desired in how the cluster is managed, DRS provides many options in the form of cluster rules, settings and advanced options.

Often the impact of using rules in a DRS cluster is not very well understood. The settings and advanced options are not very well documented. Imagine if it was possible to play around with rules in your cluster before actually applying them, or changing the DRS migration threshold in your cluster without changing the setting in your live cluster – and yet, be able to visualize the impact of those actions in your cluster?

How does DRS Dump Insight work?

DRS Dump Insight is designed as an online portal, where users can upload their drmdump file and specify the vCenter server version. After analyzing the drmdump file, the portal will present the user with a summary of vMotion recommendations that DRS made during the interval for which the drmdump file was collected. The portal also displays a summary of how the host resource usage distribution changed after the given DRS run.

DRS Dump Insight also comes with an option for What-If? analysis. The What-If? analysis runs the DRS algorithm against the same drmdump file with the options specified by the user to come up with a new summary of vMotion recommendations and the resource usage distribution. In effect, the What-If? options provide a summary of how DRS would react to the options, without actually having to run them against the live cluster. There are three What-If? options that are provided.

Rules

Rules are specified to enforce certain constraints for VMs, with respect to other VMs or hosts within the cluster. While they provide the flexibility to override DRS load balancing in order to meet performance, licensing or compliance SLAs, rules can often hinder the ability of DRS to balance the load optimally. If you want to find out if rules in your cluster are preventing DRS from improving the current load balance, you can use the What-If? option for rules. There are three types of rules you can choose:

Affinity Rules

Anti-affinity Rules

VM Host Soft Rules

DRS Dump Insight will turn off all rules of the specified type(s), run DRS again and provide a summary of vMotion recommendations. This summary can then be compared against the original summary to see the impact of dropping the selected rules on DRS load balancing.

Let us look at an example: We uploaded a drmdump file corresponding to a DRS run from our lab’s cluster in to DRS Dump Insight. From the summary of DRS recommendations, we could see that DRS did not recommend any vMotion. We then used DRS Dump Insight’s What-If? analysis to drop all soft rules in the cluster. At this point, DRS recommended 8 vMotions, and the Hosts Resource Usage Standard Deviation also improved after dropping all the soft rules. The following image compares the DRS recommendations with and without soft rules in the cluster.

We can clearly see that in this case, DRS was not able to recommend any vMotions, since it had to honor the soft rules defined in the cluster. Once we removed all of those rules, DRS was able to improve the imbalance in the cluster by recommending vMotions.

Migration Threshold

DRS migration threshold controls the amount of imbalance that will be tolerated in the cluster. DRS has five threshold levels ranging between 1 (most conservative) and 5 (most aggressive). The more aggressive the level, the less DRS tolerates imbalance in the cluster. As a result, you might see DRS initiate more migrations and generate a more even load distribution when you increase the migration threshold level. By default, DRS migration threshold level is set to 3. If you want to know how DRS will behave if you change its migration threshold, you can use the What-If? option for migration threshold. You can specify a level from 1 to 5, and compare the resulting DRS run summary against the current level.

Let us take an example. The following drmdump was taken when DRS was at migration threshold of 3. DRS made 5 vMotion recommendations during this run. Using What-If? analysis, when we increased the migration threshold to 5, we see that DRS makes 78 vMotion recommendations, as shown in figure.

Advanced Options

DRS generally works well with the default/recommended settings. However, not all clusters are the same, and some special cases might require specific customizations in DRS for best performance. DRS provides several advanced options to handle specific cluster requirements outside of recommended settings. You can now use What-If? to specify certain hand-picked advanced options against the current cluster state (drmdump file). This gives you an idea of how the cluster state will change as a result of enabling the advanced option, before actually enabling it in your live cluster.

DRS Dump Insight is an attempt at providing an under-the-hood view of how DRS is working to keep your cluster happy and healthy. It is also the first tool to provide a unique and powerful What-If? analysis to help make the best use of DRS capabilities in your clusters.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/resource-management-vsphere-drs.html/feed1Introducing DRS DumpInsighthttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/drsdumpinsight.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/drsdumpinsight.html#respondWed, 23 Aug 2017 15:29:39 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3200In an effort to provide a more insightful user experience and to help understand how vSphere DRS works, we recently released a fling: DRS Dump Insight. DRS Dump Insight is a service portal where users can upload drmdump files and it provides a summary of the DRS run, with a breakup of all the possible moves along […]

]]>In an effort to provide a more insightful user experience and to help understand how vSphere DRS works, we recently released a fling: DRS Dump Insight.

DRS Dump Insight is a service portal where users can upload drmdump files and it provides a summary of the DRS run, with a breakup of all the possible moves along with the changes in ESX hosts resource consumption before and after DRS run.

Users can get answers to questions like:

Why did DRS make a certain recommendation?

Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster?

What recommendations did DRS drop due to cost/benefit analysis?

Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS?

Once the drmdump file is uploaded, the portal provides a summary of all the possible vMotion choices DRS went through before coming up with the final recommendations.

The portal also enables users to do What-If analysis on their DRS clusters with options like:

]]>VMware Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) is a storage policy framework that helps administrators match VM workload requirements against storage capabilities. SPBM runs as an independent service in the vCenter Server. We recently released a white paper that covers SPBM performance in two sections.

1: Performance comparison of vCenter 6.5 vs. vCenter 6.0 U3

In the first section, we cover performance improvements of SPBM in vCenter 6.5 over vCenter 6.0 U3. Here is a chart from the white paper showing improvement in one of the SPBM workflows.

2: Scaling API Latency for vCenter 6.5

In the next section, we cover scaling trends of SPBM APIs in vCenter 6.5. To determine scaling patterns, we passed an increasing number of entities to these APIs as input. The charts are plotted for number of entities against the time it took to complete the task. Below is one such chart from the whitepaper.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/spbm-performance-whitepaper.html/feed0New White Paper: Fast Virtualized Hadoop and Spark on All-Flash Disks – Best Practices for Optimizing Virtualized Big Data Applications on VMware vSphere 6.5https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/big-data-vsphere65-perf.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/big-data-vsphere65-perf.html#commentsTue, 15 Aug 2017 21:36:40 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3177A new white paper is available showing how to best deploy and configure vSphere 6.5 for Big Data applications such as Hadoop and Spark running on a cluster with fast processors, large memory, and all-flash storage (Non-Volatile Memory Express storage and solid state disks). Hardware, software, and vSphere configuration parameters are documented, as well as […]

]]>A new white paper is available showing how to best deploy and configure vSphere 6.5 for Big Data applications such as Hadoop and Spark running on a cluster with fast processors, large memory, and all-flash storage (Non-Volatile Memory Express storage and solid state disks). Hardware, software, and vSphere configuration parameters are documented, as well as tuning parameters for the operating system, Hadoop, and Spark.

The best practices were tested on a 13-server cluster, with Hadoop installed on vSphere as well as on bare metal. Workloads for both Hadoop (TeraSort and TestDFSIO) and Spark Machine Learning Library routines (K-means clustering, Logistic Regression classification, and Random Forest decision trees) were run on the cluster. Configurations with 1, 2, and 4 VMs per host were tested as well as bare metal. Among the 4 virtualized configurations, 4 VMs per host ran fastest due to the best utilization of storage as well as the highest percentage of data transfer within a server. The 4 VMs per host configuration also ran faster than bare metal on all Hadoop and Spark tests but one.

Here are the results for the TeraSort suite:

And for Spark Random Forest decision trees:

Here are the best practices cited in this paper:

Reserve about 5-6% of total server memory for ESXi; use the remainder for the virtual machines.

Do not overcommit physical memory on any host server that is hosting Big Data workloads.

Create one or more virtual machines per NUMA node.

Limit the number of disks per DataNode to maximize the utilization of each disk: 4 to 6 is a good starting point.

Use eager-zeroed thick VMDKs along with the ext4 or xfs filesystem inside the guest.

Use the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (pvscsi) adapter for disk controllers; use all 4 virtual SCSI controllers available in vSphere 6.5.

Use the vmxnet3 network driver; configure virtual switches with MTU=9000 for jumbo frames.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/08/big-data-vsphere65-perf.html/feed1DRS Lens – A new UI dashboard for DRShttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/07/drs-lens.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/07/drs-lens.html#commentsFri, 14 Jul 2017 03:21:51 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3148DRS Lens provides an alternative UI for a DRS enabled cluster. It gives a simple, yet powerful interface to monitor the cluster real time and provide useful analyses to the users. The UI is comprised of different dashboards in the form of tabs for each cluster being monitored. Cluster Balance Dashboard showing the variations in the cluster balance […]

]]>DRS Lens provides an alternative UI for a DRS enabled cluster. It gives a simple, yet powerful interface to monitor the cluster real time and provide useful analyses to the users. The UI is comprised of different dashboards in the form of tabs for each cluster being monitored.

Cluster Balance

Dashboard showing the variations in the cluster balance metric plotted over time with DRS runs. This shows how DRS reacts to and tries to clear cluster imbalance every time it runs.

VM Happiness

This dashboard shows VM happiness for the first time in a UI. This chart shows the summary of total VMs in the cluster that are happy and those that are unhappy based on the user defined thresholds. Users can then select individual VMs to view performance metrics related to its happiness, like CPU ready time and memory swapIn rate.

vMotions

This dashboard provides a summary of vMotions that happened in the cluster over time. For each DRS run period, there will be a breakdown of vMotions as DRS-initiated and user-initiated. This helps users see how actively DRS has been working to resolve cluster imbalance. It also helps to see if there are vMotions outside of DRS control, which may be affecting cluster balance.

Operations

This dashboard tracks different operations (tasks, in vCenter Server) that happened in the cluster, over time. Users can correlate information about tasks from this dashboard against DRS load balancing and its effects from the other dashboards.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/07/drs-lens.html/feed1The Extreme Performance Series at VMworld 2017https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/the-extreme-performance-series-at-vmworld-2017.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/the-extreme-performance-series-at-vmworld-2017.html#respondTue, 20 Jun 2017 17:49:49 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3104I’m excited to announce that the “Extreme Performance Series” is back for its 5th year, and with 7 additional sessions, it’s our largest year ever! These sessions are created and presented by VMware’s best and most distinguished performance engineers, principals, architects and gurus. You do not want to miss these advanced sessions. Sessions and Group […]

I’m excited to announce that the “Extreme Performance Series” is back for its 5th year, and with 7 additional sessions, it’s our largest year ever! These sessions are created and presented by VMware’s best and most distinguished performance engineers, principals, architects and gurus. You do not want to miss these advanced sessions.

Sessions and Group Discussion

Spread across four different VMworld tracks, you’ll find these sessions chalk full of performance details that you won’t get anywhere else. They’ll also be recorded so if the sessions you want to see aren’t being hosted in your region, you’ll still get access to it.

See the VMworld catalog for a more detailed abstract and list of speakers!

Bootcamps

The VMware vSphere Advanced Performance Bootcamp provides the most advanced technical performance oriented training available about vSphere performance design, tuning and troubleshooting. VMware Certified Design Expert Mark Achtemichuk and a team of VMware Performance Engineers will cover a broad range of topics that cover all resource dimensions including the ESXi scheduler, memory management, storage and network optimization. Attendees will learn how to identify the location of performance issues, diagnose their root cause and remediate a wide variety of performance conundrums using the many techniques practiced by the most seasoned vSphere veterans and other VMware experts.

Ask The Experts

This program allows you to book some one-on-one time with various highly skilled VMware professionals. Performance experts will be available to sit down and talk with, as well as challenge them with your most difficult questions. This is a great forum to get specific questions answered or to explore your particular environment.

Hands On Labs

This Performance lab is always extremely popular and has been rebuilt to include topics such as using benchmark tools like DVD Store and Weathervane, rightsizing your virtual machines, how power policy affect performance and basic troubleshooting of CPU, MEM, storage and Network dimensions. With over 5 hours of content, you’ll need to take this lab several times.

HOL-1804-02-CHG vSphere Challenge Lab

This challenge format lab, in which you take the lead and diagnose and fix various vSphere issues, includes new scenarios around vNUMA, Latency Sensitivity, Poor Performance and Resource Pools. This is great way to experience some off the most common performance issues and how to resolve them in a fun and prescriptive way.

2017 will be a banner year for the Extreme Performance Series and we look forward to you joining us! Look out for a few surprises such as, draws for Frank & Niels new Host Resource Deep Dive Book (https://twitter.com/hostdeepdive), performance stickers and I’m told Melvin the Monster VM will even make some appearances

]]>VMmark 3.0, VMware’s multi-host virtualization benchmark is generally available here. VMmark3 is a free cluster-level benchmark that measures the performance, scalability, and power of virtualization platforms.

VMmark3 leverages much of previous VMmark generations’ technologies and design. It continues to utilize a unique tile-based heterogeneous workload application design. It also deploys the platform-level workloads found in VMmark2 such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, and Clone & Deploy. In addition to incorporating new and updated application workloads and infrastructure operations, VMmark3 also introduces a new fully automated provisioning service that greatly reduces deployment complexity and time.

Figure 1: VMmark3

The VMmark3 Benchmark:

Allows accurate and reliable benchmarking of virtual data center performance and power consumption of host and storage components.

Allows the analysis of changes in hardware, software, and configuration within virtualization environments.

VMmark3 Application Workloads:

DVDstore3: The third generation DVDstore benchmark is a complete online e-commerce test application with a back-end database component, a web application tier, and driver programs. The application simulates users logging into a web server and browsing a catalog of products using basic queries. VMmark3 utilizes DVDstore3 with 4 virtual machines, 3 Apache web-tier VMs and 1 MySQL database VM. One of the web servers delivers a constant load to the database, while the other two deliver a cyclical load to generate a bursty profile.

Weathervane: This is a highly scalable web application that contains a variety of support services working with a core application that simulates an online auction. Each VMmark3 tile contains two independent instances of the Weathervane Auction application, one static and one elastic, for a sum of 14 VMs (8 static and 6 elastic). The elastic workload mimics self-scaling applications by periodically adding and removing an application server and web server throughout the benchmark run.

Standby: The standby server mimics a heartbeat server.

VMmark3 Infrastructure Operations:

vMotion: This infrastructure operation live migrates one of the Weathervane Auction RabbitMQ VMs in a round-robin fashion to simulate modern sysadmin operations.

Storage vMotion: For this operation, one of the Standby VMs is migrated to a user-specified maintenance partition and then, after a period of rest, returns to the original location.

XvMotion: This operation simultaneously moves one of the DS3WebA VMs to an alternate host and maintenance partition. Similar to Storage vMotion, after a period of rest, the VM will return to its original location.

Automated Load Balancing (DRS): VMmark requires that DRS be enabled and running to ensure typical rebalancing operations occur within the environment under test.

VMmark3 Provisioning Service:

VMmark3 features a highly-automated setup and tile-creation process that makes benchmark deployment fast and easy, with little to no manual intervention. The entire process is seeded from a single OVA and can be utilized in an unattended mode for tile0 to N. VMmark3 uses CentOS-based free or open-source software throughout, eliminating the need for purchasing additional software licenses.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/introducing-vmmark3.html/feed1NEW VMworld 2017 Bootcamp – vSphere Advanced Performance Design, Configuration and Troubleshootinghttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/new-vmworld-2017-bootcamp-vsphere-advanced-performance-design-configuration-and-troubleshooting.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/new-vmworld-2017-bootcamp-vsphere-advanced-performance-design-configuration-and-troubleshooting.html#commentsThu, 01 Jun 2017 17:54:22 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3091New this year for VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, we will be offering a pre-VMworld bootcamp focused on vSphere platform performance. Specific SQL and Oracle bootcamps will still be offered, but we have had many requests for a workload agnostic program. This bootcamp will enable you to confidently support all your virtual workloads and give […]

New this year for VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, we will be offering a pre-VMworld bootcamp focused on vSphere platform performance. Specific SQL and Oracle bootcamps will still be offered, but we have had many requests for a workload agnostic program. This bootcamp will enable you to confidently support all your virtual workloads and give you an opportunity to directly interact with VMware Performance Engineering.

The VMware vSphere Advanced Performance Bootcamp provides the most advanced technical performance oriented training available about vSphere performance design, tuning and troubleshooting. VMware Certified Design Expert Mark Achtemichuk and a team of VMware Performance Engineers will cover a broad range of topics that cover all resource dimensions including the ESXi scheduler, memory management, storage and network optimization. Attendees will learn how to identify the location of performance issues, diagnose their root cause and remediate a wide variety of performance conundrums using the many techniques practiced by the most seasoned vSphere veterans and other VMware experts.

]]>https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/06/new-vmworld-2017-bootcamp-vsphere-advanced-performance-design-configuration-and-troubleshooting.html/feed6Introducing TPCx-HS Version 2 – An Industry Standard Benchmark for Apache Spark and Hadoop clusters deployed on premise or in the cloudhttps://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/05/introducing-tpcx-hs-version-2-an-industry-standard-benchmark-for-apache-spark-and-hadoop-clusters-deployed-on-premise-or-in-the-cloud.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2017/05/introducing-tpcx-hs-version-2-an-industry-standard-benchmark-for-apache-spark-and-hadoop-clusters-deployed-on-premise-or-in-the-cloud.html#commentsTue, 23 May 2017 00:13:32 +0000http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/?p=3048Since its release on August 2014, the TPCx-HS Hadoop benchmark has helped drive competition in the Big Data marketplace, generating 23 publications spanning 5 Hadoop distributions, 3 hardware vendors, 2 OS distributions and 1 virtualization platform. By all measures, it has proven to be a successful industry standard benchmark for Hadoop systems. However, the Big Data […]

]]>Since its release on August 2014, the TPCx-HS Hadoop benchmark has helped drive competition in the Big Data marketplace, generating 23 publications spanning 5 Hadoop distributions, 3 hardware vendors, 2 OS distributions and 1 virtualization platform. By all measures, it has proven to be a successful industry standard benchmark for Hadoop systems. However, the Big Data landscape has rapidly changed over the last 30 months. Key technologies have matured while new ones have risen to prominence in an effort to keep pace with the exponential expansion of datasets. One such technology is Apache Spark.

According to a Big Data survey published by the Taneja Group, more than half of the respondents reported actively using Spark, with a notable increase in usage over the 12 months following the survey. Clearly, Spark is an important component of any Big Data pipeline today. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, there is also a significant trend towards deploying Spark in the cloud. What is driving this adoption of Spark? Predominantly, performance.

Today, with the widespread adoption of Spark and its integration into many commercial Big Data platform offerings, I believe there needs to be a straightforward, industry standard way in which Spark performance and price/performance could be objectively measured and verified. Just like TPCx-HS Version 1 for Hadoop, the workload needs to be well understood and the metrics easily relatable to the end user.

Continuing on the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s commitment to bringing relevant benchmarks to the industry, it is my pleasure to announce TPCx-HS Version 2 for Spark and Hadoop. In keeping with important industry trends, not only does TPCx-HS support traditional on premise deployments, but also cloud.

I envision that TPCx-HS will continue to be a useful benchmark standard for customers as they evaluate Big Data deployments in terms of performance and price/performance, and for vendors in demonstrating the competitiveness of their products.